Canary Mission is dangerous to your professional health

I was recently involved in the struggle of Hammam Farah, a young Canadian psychotherapist, to free himself from the damage to his reputation inflicted by the pro-Zionist organization Canary Mission—an episode that provides a harrowing example of how Canary Mission’s relentless attacks on free speech threaten the future of professionals who speak out in defense of the rights of Palestinians. As is well known, the Canary Mission website features a long list of individual scholars, activists, professors, and others whose work opposes the Israeli political position—a list infamous for name-calling, blacklisting, and distortions of fact. Farah’s experience demonstrates how an absence of an adequate awareness of the goals and methods of this website readily enables legitimate professional organizations to be taken in by its manipulations.

Long ago, Farah’s name and photograph were uploaded to Canary Mission, accompanied by an exhaustive list of misrepresentations about his activism and the false statement that he supports terrorism. To be clear, Farah is a prolific writer, speaker, and community organizer on behalf of the people of Palestine. Many of his public statements articulate the position that an occupied people have the right under international law to resist their occupiers, so long as their targets are military and not civilian. It is this important distinction that the Canary Mission ignores, in order to make the baseless assertion that Farah supports terrorism. There is in fact no evidence anywhere to validate the Canary Mission’s claims that Farah holds antisemitic views or whitewashes terrorist attacks on civilians.

As Farah pursued his ongoing studies at the Toronto Centre for Training in Psychotherapy in 2018, he was one day approached by a member of its faculty to discuss a problem: a potential patient had been referred to Farah for psychotherapy, but prior to his first session, had conducted an internet search to discover what he might learn about the new therapist who had been assigned to him. This man was understandably alarmed by what he read on the Canary Mission website and contacted the Centre for Training to request a different therapist assignment. Hearing this report from the patient, the faculty of the Centre for Training was also concerned to establish whether Farah was as described—i.e. someone who supports terrorism and encourages hate. Farah in turn was very worried about what this event might involve for his future as a professional; he sought help from the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network, where I serve on the Steering Committee—an organization of mental health clinicians, activists, and researchers devoted to promoting the understanding of realities in Palestine. 

The USA-Palestine Mental Health Network then wrote a formal letter to the Centre for Training, explaining that it was not Farah but the Canary Mission that whipped up hate, and clarifying that his activism on behalf of the people of Palestine was in fact an asset to his professionalism. The Centre for Training promptly reassured Farah that it was very pleased to have received this letter and confirmed that he could count on the Centre for support going forward. There the matter appeared to rest.

But not for long.

Over the following months, I wrote in conjunction with the noted Palestinian psychiatrist Samah Jabr MD a scholarly journal article documenting several examples of silencing within mental health organizations; we included as one of our examples Farah’s experience with Canary Mission and the Toronto Centre for Training. 

Farah and I were astonished to see however that as soon as this journal article was published online, the article was woven into his page on the Canary Mission website—including a live link to the article itself. Several references to our article on the Canary Mission entry were quoted out of context to an absurd degree, so that the article seemed to condemn Farah and to support the claims of the Canary Mission, instead of—as our actual article made clear—supporting Farah and condemning the Canary Mission.

Despite this new embellishment of Farah’s Canary Mission entry, all apparently continued as before until Farah concluded his studies at the Centre for Training in May 2020.

At this point, Farah applied to the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario for licensure, as is required in order to graduate from the Centre for Training and to launch practice as an independent clinician. To his horror, he received in response a formal letter of inquiry from this licensing board beginning with a link to his entry on the Canary Mission website and a link to our academic journal article, and concluding with a request that Farah respond to various allegations. Once again, Farah appealed to the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and once again, the USA Network wrote a letter to the Board clarifying the fact that the Canary Mission entry about Farah was nothing more than distorted and malicious blacklisting in the service of its own political goals. Farah immediately sent the Network’s letter and his own response to the allegations to the licensing board.

The Ontario board, to its credit, issued his license two days later.

We might draw several lessons from this prolonged drama. The first is that Canary Mission appears to operate with extraordinary vigilance, ruthlessness, and relentlessness in targeting professionals, activists, and ordinary persons in its campaign to destroy reputations and careers. The second is that professional schools, colleges and universities, licensing boards, and other legitimate organizations—to say nothing of one’s prospective patients—may be entirely misled by what they read on the Canary Mission. In the case of Hammam Farah, it was very fortunate that both the Toronto Centre for Training in Psychotherapy and the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario were open to hearing fair-minded argument in his defense. The third lesson is that any single individual is painfully vulnerable to character assassination by the Canary Mission. A collective approach to defense through group awareness and group action is essential. We must organize in defense of free speech and human rights, since these values are under increasingly vitriolic political assault—and indeed, at this moment, perhaps more so than ever before.